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Target Readership	Sen. Secondary					For help with criteria, click here
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Contents:

First words; 1 - Origins; 2 - Species; 3 - Populations; 4 - Interactions; 5 - Communities; 6 - Systems; 7 - Balances; 8 - Scales; 9 - Checks.

Review:

The aim of the first edition was to provide an introductory text for ecology/environmental science undergraduates. This aim has been kept in the second edition but there have been some useful improvements. We start with a case study of polar bears and the problems they face in Northern Norway. Pollution, carried by ocean currents, has created problems in this otherwise pristine environment. The aim here is not so much to focus on one environmental problem but on the issues that ecology helps us understand. From this point we are led sequentially through key concepts of ecology starting at the chromosonal scale and working upwards. So, chapter one looks at the origins of people as an example of species development. This is useful not just for an example but we can also use it to show how it is related to human impact. Chapter two moves on to the species starting with taxonomy and the major groups and moving on to niches and speciation. The next scale up is populations. We start with an overview of population models and see how this is related to fishing stocks. From this the chapter looks at key elements of demographics. Chapter four gets these populations interacting: co-operation, competition and consumerism i.e. food and feeding relationships. These interactions operate at the level of the community, our next level. Here the reader is introduced to a major case study - the Mediterranean ecosystem. This is chosen because it is well researched, near to large populations (this includes variants in other continents) and has had/continues to have considerable human impact upon it. Next, we move to look at systems. Here we see the familiar models describing the ecosystem in terms of food webs, chains and ecological energetics. Balances, the theme of chapter seven, describes the various flows of nutrients and other aspects that move through the environment. We start with nutrient cycles and move on to pollution and restoration ecology (restoring the balance?). Chapter eight looks at scales with a brief overview of scale issues and then a section on the biogeography of the Earth (dividing the Earth into tropical, temperate and boreal biomes). Climate change finishes the work here. The final chapter looks at the ways in which ecosystems react to the changes seen in earlier work. Essentially this is ecosystem stability (or lack thereof), and the reaction of people to the current ecological situation.

This is an interesting text. It takes an unusual perspective in dealing with scales in the way it does and there is, as they hoped, a 'narrative' to be gained in following the structure of the text. The overall layout has been improved and each chapter starts with an outline and concludes with summary, readings, websites and a good range of questions. It provides a good range of key concepts but limits these in favour of a broader treatment of the subject than is seen in many similar books. For this reason it may not appeal to specialist ecology courses but is a first-rate text for environmental science, senior secondary and introductory applied ecology courses.